OkCupid Defends Human Experiments: 'That's How Websites Work'

While news of Facebook's emotion-manipulation study sparked public outrage and investigations from regulators, dating site OkCupid is letting its users know that human experiments are a reality of using the Internet.

In a post called "We Experiment on Human Beings," founder Christian Rudder took to OkCupid's blog Monday to defend human experimentation and remind users that such tests are extremely common and even beneficial to users.

"Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," founder Christian Rudder wrote in a post on the OkTrends blog. "That’s how websites work."

The post went on to detail three such experiments the site conducted with users.

Two of the experiments revolved around user photos, which play a big role, of course, in how users on a dating site interact with one another.

For one test in January 2013, "Love is Blind Day," the site temporarily removed all users' photos to see how it would affect their interactions. Unsurprisingly, the site's traffic went down significantly, but those who did use the site in that time reportedly responded to first messages more often and exchanged contact information more quickly.

Until photos were restored, that is, at which point conversations that had started "blindly" "melted away."

The experiment also found, however, that men and women who actually tried out a "blind" date reported having a good time regardless of how attractive their date was. Furthermore, women who went on dates with more attractive men were reportedly less happy than those who went on dates with less attractive men (Rudder speculates it's because "hotter guys were assholes more often"). He also noted that, once photos were restored, the same women allowed looks to dictate whether or not they responded to messages, concluding that "people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be."

The next photo-focused experiment revolved around determining whether there was a correlation between how users scored each other for looks and personality. The thinking, Rudder explained, was to see whether users would positively rate a user's personality, even if they didn't positively rate their looks.

Again, the study found that looks trumped other factors and users positively-rated the personalities of people they found attractive, even if the rest of their profile was blank. They strengthened this theory in a followup, in which they compared how users reacted to profiles when the text of the profiles was hidden.

The results showed that text contributed less than 10% to how profiles were rated. "So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth … almost nothing," Rudder wrote.

The OKCupid test found that users had trouble separating looks from personality in their ratings.

The final experiment examined the power of suggestion in the site's matchmaking process. The site changed the results of its match algorithm to tell users who were actually judged to be incompatible that they were, in fact, highly compatible. The study found users who were told they were well-matched were much more likely to exchange messages and interact with one another, even if they were actually incompatible by the site's own metrics.

While this may seem counterintuitive for a site that purports to give users personalized recommendations based on their personality traits, Rudder says the experiment revealed that while actual compatibility is ideal, the suggestion of compatibility can be just as effective.

"If you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth," he wrote.

Based on the few comments on the blog, users are thus far neither creeped out nor upset by OkCupid's brand of human experimentation. They found the data to be funny and "kinda depressing."

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